A Brief Interlude

October 31, 2007

Feeling the impending “busy” of the coming week, we decided to get out of town for a while on Saturday. Plus it was just too dang purty to sit at home and work…

Having discovered that we all 4 like road trippin‘ (no matter how close or how far) we decided that a brief excursion to a State Park would be in order. But then we remembered that Nathan had to help train a new bartender at Graffiti’s that night, so our available radius was shrunk to somewhere only an hour or so away

Nathan is a big fan of “being” and I am a big fan of “doing” on trips – but we both enjoy the other experience as well… I think that is why we like road trips. They have a slower pace, but you still feel as if you are making progress… Wylie is a big fan of History & Museums (as are we) and Miles is a big fan of anything Wylie is a big fan of. So we choose somewhere that we had never been, that looked like it might suit us.

Des Arc, Arkansas and the Lower White River Museum. We took the back roads and drove by lots of rice and soy bean fields (ah, the fields…) and arrived at Des Arc, only to drive right past the museum. Seriously, I blinked and we missed it. It was about the size of our house and on the main road. Not at all how we pictured it would be, but there it was all the same, and (shockingly)we had it all to ourselves, with a personal tour guide.

The thing we loved about this museum and the adjoining log dog trot style cabin was that the nice tour guide let our boys touch everything and seemed genuinlly pleased to see us and our curious offspring.

Because of this the boys wwere able to truly interact with all the pieces – even putting on Civil War era clothing, sit in an old school desk and check out the outhouse – big fun!

Most of the items in the cabin were donated by locals and had labels on them giving credit where credit was due. It was nice to see that a community, even one as rural and small as Des Arc, took such pride in this teensytinsy piece of history. It was great to be in a museum that didn’t take itself too seriously and allowed it’s visitors to have fun.

Speaking of fun… I found this poster of rules for new teachers from that era to be hilarious. I would not have made it as a school teacher if I had to follow these rules, that’s for sure! Click on the picture to enlarge it and get a better look… You won’t regret it!

After we were finished at the museum, our guide pointed us to a playground by the White River, where all 3 of my boys had fun playing on the equipment, most of which I am pretty sure my Paw sold the State of Arkansas Parks and Rec in the early 1980’s.

They also had fun running (charging) down the big hill and throwing sticks and rocks into the river.

We all came home worn out just enough, very glad to have taken a brief interlude to discover something new and have some fun, just our little family.